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Tending Vertical Gardens

IN VINELAND Kari Katzander of Mingo Design, a landscaping company that specializes in vertical gardens, walls of greenery that grace interiors and exteriors.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Kari Katzander cradled a gray mesh pouch in the palm of her hand, examining the pale-green shoots that poked out of the clump of soil inside. She plucked a dead leaf, and dabbed at the soil to see if it was moist, a sign that the irrigation system that fed the pouch was ticking along properly. Then she reinserted the pouch into the stainless-steel grid that climbed the brick wall of the garden behind a Chelsea town house, there to join hundreds of fellow pouches.

Ms. Katzander was giving these pouches — handmade of geotextile fabric and stitched with the same sturdy thread NASA uses — the once-over in her role as a practitioner of one of the cooler trends in urban horticulture. The founder 15years ago of a landscape company called Mingo Design, she brings her aesthetic to everything from rooftop gardens to brownstone backyards.

Her specialty is vertical gardens — walls of greenery that grace interiors and exteriors of residential and commercial buildings around the city and beyond.

These leafy expanses, sometimes flecked with flowers, can evoke anything from a tropical jungle to a Monet landscape. But because gardens were intended to be horizontal, not vertical, and because water, left to its own devices, flows down, not sideways, they are challenging to maintain.

Various devices help these gardens thrive. Ms. Katzander’s magic bullet is the little mesh container she has christened the Mingo Pouch, which in her opinion is critical to a successful vertical garden because it allows each plant to have its own miniature ecosystem.

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Summer Rayne Oakes with her private jungle, designed for her by Kari Katzander.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

“Cute, right?” Ms. Katzander said, affectionately eyeing the one in her hand. She made the first Mingo Pouch several years ago, and so far has made thousands of them. They can even go in the washing machine. They solve a problem that can doom vertical gardens — soil falling off the wall and onto the ground. “So the question,” she said, “is how do you plant on a wall? The pouches were the answer. They were the turning point, the aha moment.”

Ms. Katzander’s route to vertical gardens began three decades ago on Fishers Island, off the eastern end of Long Island, where her father ran a marina, and she grew up dreaming of life as a marine biologist. In her late teens, she was more or less adopted — “like a stray cat,” as she put it — by Dan and Sally Gordon, an island couple who hired her as a caretaker.

“I did landscaping, fertilizing the lawn, the works,” Ms. Katzander said. “A lot of what I know, I learned from Sally.” Though she describes herself as “100 percent self-taught,” she has taken many courses in landscape design and reads voraciously in the field. By the age of 21, she had set up a business with seven employees.

In 2009 she designed a 2,260-square-foot vertical garden for the PNC Bank headquarters in Pittsburgh. These days clients ask her to create vertical gardens for their homes or offices, or to provide T.L.C. for gardens that aren’t doing well. Ms. Katzander can produce a small garden in weeks, even days, for a cost of $75 or less per square foot.

Although her services include installation and maintenance, her passion is for the design end of the job. “I love complicated things, and I love vertical gardens because of the complicated design,” she said. “The sun moving around, the shade, the different plants, putting it all together. I love the abstractness, the complicated mix of aesthetics and functionality. Creating these gardens is like building with blocks.”

Ms. Katzander is one of a number of landscape designers around the globe who design and plant vertical gardens. They represent an alluring option, especially for New Yorkers who often live surrounded by concrete with limited space for greenery.

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Rhipsalis, a cactus, is among Ms. Katzander's choices for wall gardens.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

“A lot of landscape designers are creating these walls, and there are a lot of different approaches out there,” said Karen Daubmann, the associate vice president for exhibitions of the New York Botanical Garden, which has installed vertical gardens in connection with exhibitions. “They’re not easy because there are so many technical issues — irrigation, proper nutrients, choosing the right plant palette. But people like being surrounded by plants, so why not?”

Patrick Blanc, a French botanist whose book “The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City” is considered a classic work on the subject, agrees that when it comes to vertical gardens, the challenges are great and the avenues varied. “In nature,” Mr. Blanc said, “plants grow in many different ways, and when it comes to creating vertical gardens, many things are possible. Different people have different approaches.”

When designing a vertical garden for a client, Ms. Katzander first asks, who is your favorite artist? For Summer Rayne Oakes, the model and television host, the answer was Henri Rousseau. His jungly image “The Dream” inspired the lush vertical garden that Ms. Katzander created for Ms. Oakes’s home, a onetime industrial space in Williamsburg.

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Sustaining a vertical garden is tougher than it may look to a layperson. The initial photographs that people post on Facebook and Pinterest are gorgeous, and owners of these gardens congratulate themselves for making creative use of small and challenging spaces. But come back a few months later, and the magic may have faded.

“People spend a great deal of money on a vertical garden,” Ms. Katzander said, “and then it may die after a season. The plants may look good at first, but without a proper water distribution method, the correct planting medium and an efficient maintenance system, lo and behold, after a winter in New York, the plant survival rate is low. That’s the dirty little secret of vertical gardens. They’re not as sustainable as everyone says.”

A major challenge has to do with keeping plants moist. Most vertical gardens are watered from the top down, creating a system whereby water doesn’t always reach the plants it is intended for, because, as Ms. Katzander said, “You can’t plant on a waterfall.”

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Ms. Katzander at work.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

It was Edwin Garcia, her business partner and husband, who pinpointed this issue for her. One solution lay in Ms. Katzander’s pouches, because they catch and absorb water. Another involves using a subirrigation system that provides water to plants on an as-needed basis through the geotextile fabric. With the subirrigation system, there is no need for drainage because there is no excess water.

Ms. Katzander and Mr. Garcia live and work in a Jersey City brownstone along with Ms. Katzander’s son, Conrad, 10. The day of her visit to Chelsea she was up at 5 a.m. to fulfill the terms of the maintenance contract intended to keep the vertical garden as lush as the day it was installed.

Ms. Katzander used six different plants for this particular installation — autumn and Boston ferns, variegated liriope, pachysandra, lysimachia aurea and heuchera. Water flowed through a Netafim drip line directly into the pouches, which were wedged into the openings of the grid.

To start with, Ms. Katzander checked the pouches for moisture levels and bugs — spider mites are a particular bane — and switched a few of them around accordingly. “Let me just put this guy in,” she said, stuffing a plump specimen into an opening. Where a plant has died, she inserts a new one.

She often teaches her clients how to attend to their vertical gardens, and is “thrilled when they play an active role in their creation.” She is also immensely proud when her creations thrive. “Just look at the babies these fiddleheads have produced,” she said, admiring one robust specimen. “You know that they’re happy.”

John Wood, a banker who with his partner, Malcolm Grant, bought and renovated the Chelsea town house, went the vertical-garden route out of necessity. “We had a small yard with limited beds,” Mr. Wood said, “and the walls were so high, we needed something to cover all the wall space.” He is glad he did. “It’s a great visual, especially from the inside of the house. It’s a bit of an oasis, very calming.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2013, on Page RE1 of the New York edition with the headline: Please Weed the Wallpaper. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe